STORY ARCHIVE

Greenhouse Debate

Next week, more than 55 nations are expected to ratify the Kyoto protocol, limiting greenhouse gas emissions. They say it's our only hope of warding off catastrophic climate change - but Australia won't be part of it. But is this, as critics claim, just so much green window dressing? Is it a serious alternative to Kyoto, or a billion dollars worth of hot air?

TRANSCRIPT

Narration: The 1990’s was the hottest decade on record. 1998, the hottest year for 1,000 years. Unusually high water temperatures caused a massive die-off of corals around the world. Glaciers are retreating and permafrost is melting.

PROF. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Those of us who were worried about global warming in the 70’s and 80’s were primarily doing it on theoretical reasons. We knew that heat trapping gases were building up in the atmosphere. And since then we’ve looked around the world at tree rings and coral reefs and been able to put together the temperature of the last thousand years and find out that the last 30 years are not only unusual, but it is the warmest period in that thousand year record. It’s off the charts relative to everything else that’s happened.

PROF. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Trees are flowering earlier. Birds are laying their eggs earlier. Butterflies are moving up hills. So nature is already responding and that is to a few tenths of a degree warming in the last few decades. So imagine if we warm up 10 times that in the next 100 years.

Narration: The objective of the Kyoto protocol was to limit greenhouse gas emissions - an attempt to avoid climate change happening so rapidly that the world can’t keep up. Last week the Australian Government released figures indicating we would come close to meeting our nominated greenhouse gas reduction targets.

DR DAVID KEMP: The measures that we have already put in place have put Australia on track to achieve the 108% over 1990 emissions.

Narration: Despite this, the government will not be signing the legally binding Kyoto agreement. Can we as a nation go it alone? Or are we doing too little, too late to avert a looming climate change disaster?

DR GRAEME PEARMAN: It’s definitely apparent in Australia. It’s occurred everywhere and in some areas like northern New South Wales and Queensland the rise of minimum temperature by several degrees now means that the frequency of frost events for example has changed dramatically. We’re expecting over most of the planet rainfall to increase but in fact Australia it will be the reverse. We’re also expecting evaporation to increase so available water in the Australian region is something that we are concerned about.

Narration: We are heading for more drought. Less water for stock, for crops and for fighting the inevitable bushfires that will follow. In a country with perhaps the most to lose from climate change, for most of us things are still pretty much business as usual…

DR DAVID KEMP: You have to recognise that Australia is a great resource country. The world relies on us for a lot of industries. Iron and steel. Coal. Alumina and aluminium. We have a very big agricultural sector and so of course when we produce emissions from these industries others countries are not producing them.

DR CLIVE HAMILTON: Among industrialised countries Australia has the highest per capita emissions. Australians in other words are the worst polluters in the world. The Government sometimes says, yes, but we only contribute a small amount to the total of emissions, and compared to the US that’s true. But in fact Australia’s emissions are higher than those of France. They’re higher than those of Italy and several other European countries, even though France and Italy for instance have three times the population.

Narration: But while Europe is set to sign Kyoto, Australia doesn’t believe that joining in is in our national interest.

DR DAVID KEMP: It has no pathway for the involvement of developing countries. The United States is not a part of it. 75% of global emissions are not covered by Kyoto. So it’s quite clear that at the moment we don’t have an effective framework.

PROF STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: I think the United States and Australia are missing the point about Kyoto. The issue isn’t whether everybody should play. Everybody has to play. Kyoto by itself can’t stop global warming. What Kyoto can do is give us a ten year experiment in something really rare – global co-operation.

MAREE McCASKILL: I think if you look at what’s happening with the rest of Europe they really are saying that Australia is a bit of a laughing stock. It’s got to be taken seriously, it must be dealt with, it’s beyond politics. And I’m not sure Australia recognises it’s beyond politics.

DR CLIVE HAMILTON: The government says that - even though our emissions will increase by 33% between 1990 and 2010 - we will still meet our Kyoto target, which is 8%. How? By exploiting the loopholes the Australian Government had specifically inserted into the Kyoto protocol.

Narration: One of the concessions won by Australia at Kyoto was to be allowed to reduce emissions by cutting back on land clearing. A second option was to grow forests, which soak up carbon. Another good environmental measure, but one unlikely to help in the long run…

PROF. MARK ADAMS: Just in the State of Victoria we would literally have to use all the water out of the Murray River and irrigate an area the size of the Mallee just to offset power station emissions for a very short term. It’s an incredible amount of area of trees that you’d need and clearly that would have such disastrous consequences, social, economic, that you would never do it.

Narration: To make any long-term impact on emissions the Government is left with the more challenging option of reducing emissions in the first place....

DR DAVID KEMP: If you have a look at our present framework it’s a mixture of mandatory and voluntary measures. It has the mandatory renewable energy target, which is already encouraging the development of alternative forms of energy. And it also has a number of highly effective voluntary measures such as the Greenhouse Challenge and the greenhouse friendly certification.

MAREE McCASKILL: My own sector, the beverage sector, is very tired of leading the way on environmental policy, but seeing competitors and other companies doing nothing. So what’s the incentive for companies to do the right thing? Absolutely nothing. If you aren’t going to deal with all of those issues about pollution and emissions then there’s going to be a penalty for that. And unless it is applied hard then it will have no effect on corporate Australia.

Narration: But if we do meet our Kyoto targets anyway does reducing industry emissions really matter? On average, every molecule of carbon dioxide lasts in the atmosphere for 100 years. If we want to stop CO2 in the atmosphere doubling or tripling current levels, the cuts set by Kyoto won’t even come close…

DR DAVID KEMP: When Kyoto is ratified, if it’s ratified, and I expect that it probably will be, it will reduce global emissions by 1%, whereas we need a 50-60% reduction by the end of the century.

PROF. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Well we’ve had ten years of negotiation leading up to Kyoto. It’s an imperfect but still functional agreement and to let the perfect crowd out the good is not a very good strategy particularly from countries that are notorious in high emissions rates and the rest of the world is suspicious of us and rightly so.”

Narration: Even the best climate models paint a bleak future unless net greenhouse emissions are effectively halted over the next century. Whatever the solution, the sooner we tackle the problem, the less painful it will be.

PROF. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: What is global warming? It’s the result of billions of individual decisions. You know you drive a big car rather than a small car. Do not put efficient windows in the house rather than efficient windows. Made by us, made by corporations, made by nations, and then dumping waste into the atmosphere. Well you can’t manage that at the scale of the individual. You have to manage the atmosphere at the scale of the atmosphere and that’s why it takes international agreement.

We are living in a laboratory except this one has not got ants and rats in some kind of ivy covered academic hall. This is the Earth.